Its a bit of a late entry, but last night I was on call for hospital, doing a 24h shift covering most of the medical patients at a local hospital. My memory of September 11 had to do with an early stage of my Medical training, so somehow the time I spent early this morning seems apropos for this post.

September 11th, 2001 — I was just starting my third year of medical school, and a part of training they call ‘clerkship’, where they place medical students in hospital for the initiation of their clinical training. ‘Clerkship’ hadn’t started in earnest, and in September there were several ‘pre-clerkship’ courses at the University to prepare us for what was ahead (a lot), so that we wouldn’t freak out and melt down (their intentions were good) within the first few weeks of our training.

On that morning, I’ll never forget hearing over the local 24h news station how two planes had flown into the World Training Centre — and the deep pit in the bottom of my stomach that was telling me that this was not an accident.